Workload-Specific File System Benchmarks

Keith Arnold Smith, Ph.D. Thesis, Harvard University, January 2001.

A fundamental problem with the current generation of file system
benchmarks is that they fail to take into account the fact that a file
system's performance can vary depending on the workload running on it.
Many benchmarks attempt to reduce file system performance to a single
number, producing a simple one-dimensional ordering of the systems being
tested. Although this may be useful for marketing literature, the
performance of file systems in the real world is more complicated.
Different workloads place different demands on the file system, and can
result in different behavior from the underlying system. A file system
that provides superior performance for a web server may have inferior
performance when running a software development workload.

HBench-FS addresses this problem by providing a framework for
workload-specific file system benchmarks. HBench-FS profiles
a file system and a workload separately, and provides a set of tools
for combining these profiles to predict the performance of the workload
on the target file system. HBench-FS provides detailed predictions of
the performance of different parts of the file system interface,
allowing researchers and developers to isolate the areas of file system
performance that present the greatest bottlenecks for particular workloads.